Olivia Munn on Building Igloos, Art Theft, and Mortdecai

Olivia Munn has been charming comedy fans and gadget enthusiasts since she first appeared on Attack of the Show, the cult-hit news and technology review on the channel formerly known as G4, in 2006. Since then she's played a fake journalist on The Daily Show and a real journalist on HBO's The Newsroom. She currently stars alongside a very mustachioed Johnny Depp in the action-comedy Mortdecai (out January 23), which deserves its own special award, even if it didn't come out in 2014. She sat down with David Katz in Los Angeles to discuss.

Olivia Munn has been charming comedy fans and gadget enthusiasts since she first appeared on Attack of the Show, the cult-hit news and technology review on the channel formerly known as G4, in 2006. Since then she's played a fake journalist on The Daily Show and a real journalist on HBO's The Newsroom. She currently stars alongside a very mustachioed Johnny Depp in the action-comedy Mortdecai (out January 23), which deserves its own special award, even if it didn't come out in 2014. She sat down with David Katz in Los Angeles to discuss.

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POPULAR MECHANICS: This is a weird-looking movie.

OLIVIA MUNN: It's a comedy heist movie. Johnny Depp, who plays Charles Mortdecai, is a British man who's running out of money and selling off his possessions to keep up his lifestyle. I play a spoiled rich girl who hears about a special painting that could be worth a lot of money, so she goes out to steal it.

PM: Why would she steal it?

OM: Everyone's trying to get this painting. My character has a very strange mustache fetish, so that can derail things sometimes. There's definitely a scene with a horse.

PM: So this is slapstick.

OM: Grounded in reality.

PM: I read that you used to build things with your brothers. How many brothers do you have?

OM: Two. My older brother makes motorcycles, and my younger brother is an engineer. He recently went back to school for his master's in physics.

PM: Is this an affinity that you share? Are you mechanical?

OM: Yeah. My sisters were always doing makeup and curlers, and I wasn't interested in that. As early as I can remember, when we'd all be kicked outside for the summer, my brothers and I would make a huge fort and string out the electricity from inside and build an air-conditioning unit. In the winter we built igloos. We made them so perfect that we'd be sweating inside. For fun, occasionally we'd decide to do something like make our own batteries out of pennies. We'd just create.

PM: A battery made out of pennies?

OM: It's just a battery. You can charge like—we did something that lit up. Obviously it's easier to go buy a battery, but it was more the idea of it. A Survivorman kind of thing.

OM: The biggest thing I ever did was for G4: "Avatar Thelma & Louise." In our skit, they actually survive, somewhat, and get turned into avatars. We had to do full blue makeup. I was blue for a long time. Blue in my ears, blue everywhere. You're probably thinking, wait, wait—why do we have her on the cover? But I did do my own stunts on Mortdecai.

PM: What kind of stunts?

OM: I learned how to ride a horse. They told me I had to jump out of a story-and-a-half window. They said, we've got a stunt double, but why don't you just see if you can do it?

PM: Did you like doing that?

OM: I grew up doing karate and gymnastics and everything, so there's a part of me that likes the challenge. Later I had to ride in on this horse at full gallop through a very narrow path and trees coming up over us and land literally on a dime and jump off the horse.

PM: Good enough for us.

Olivia Munn is editing our movie awards in the February 2015 issue. Here's a teaser of some of the picks: